There’s a Navajo saying: “When you walk into the future, you must walk in beauty.” When it comes to energy, this is difficult to follow for the current generation of Navajo. Many of the dirtiest coal plants and uranium mines in the country are on Navajo Nation, polluting its land and water and causing health problems. Despite this, of the 300,000 enrolled Navajo tribal members, it is estimated that 18,000 of them don’t have electricity. This past summer, Dreaming New Mexico and New Energy Economy, two energy-focused organizations at work in the Southwest, installed solar panels ... Read More
Consistency Key to Renewable Energy Policy
October 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The bankruptcy of the solar startup Solyndra last month has placed government funding for renewable energy projects under a microscope. Were the government-guaranteed loans a wise way to use public funding to help green technologies? An analysis conducted by the George Soros-funded Climate Policy Initiative (“Evaluating Policies for Low Carbon Growth”) looked at six large-scale renewable energy projects in the United States and Europe, seeking answers about how their real costs matched up with their estimates, and "how policy affects project economics." The six projects were: wind ... Read More
Solyndra’s Problems Were More Politics Than Power
October 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In September, Dan Arvizu, who heads the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, made a prescient prediction during a European solar energy conference. He said the meteoric growth of photovoltaic installations over the last six years would cause fossil fuel and nuclear interests to demonize solar cells in hope of killing what they might see as a powerful threat. Days later, Washington politicians started ramping up an investigation into Solyndra, a leading maker of thin-film solar cells that had gone bankrupt two years after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. ... Read More
Greece, North Africa Promote Their Solar Projects
September 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
If you listen to solar advocates in Europe, the upheavals on this side of the globe — revolutions in North Africa, debt misery in Greece — have only brightened the prospects for solar power. German plans to phase out nuclear power have put at least one large nation in the market for new sources of power, and two would-be providers have sworn that global crises won't hurt their ambitions. On the contrary — they'll help! (Just watch out for those other solar salesmen.) First there's Greece. Germany's perennial project to both aid Greece and save the euro might include a deal to buy ... Read More
Solar Entrepreneurs’ New Sales Pitch
August 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Solar power has taken root — not in the U.S. where it supplies but 1 percent of the power generated only from renewable sources — but in energy-deprived villages of the developing world. Because costs for electricity in the U.S. are already low, unlike in rural India and Africa, the incentive to turn over to solar is lower for American households. But in poor areas around the world, some communities have skipped an entire generation of coal-powered electricity. Despite the attractiveness of solar cells and solar concentrators lighting up and heating poor villages, solar brings its ... Read More